Lewis University, our final Festival production!

It’s the end of the Festival, y’all. Which is a somewhat surreal and amazing thing. On the one hand, I imagine everyone feels a bit relieved to have reached the culmination of so much effort. And most of you have already started moving on to the next creative project – full steam ahead.

But there’s definitely something sad about it too. At least for me. It’s sort of like we threw this tremendous party that spanned roughly a quarter of the year… and now everyone has headed home. And it’s sort of quiet.

Everyone here at Plays for Presidents has been greatly impacted by your presence in this grand experiment. And every single one of us is insanely grateful for all you did to make it such an historical and powerful event.

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In all the madness of this Festival, announcements for some of our latest joiners fell by the wayside. I take the blame. But now let’s shine a light on these intrepid theatre makers so the world knows they were at this party with the rest of us!

Nautilus Music Theater, Saint Paul, MN

One of the most amazing things that happened as part of our Festival involved the highly regarded Nautilus Music Theater adapting 5 plays from 44 Plays for 44 Presidents into mini operas! Yes! Five plays from our show, about five of the worst presidents of the United States, with representation by all five authors, were turned into some amazing operatic works that made us all really geek out. We wished we could have been there! They didn’t participate in our video project, but they were members of the Festival nonetheless.

Olathe North High School,  Olathe, KS

Olathe North, proud owners of the entire state of Kansas for this Festival, opened their production on Oct. 20 and closed on Oct 29. They also didn’t contribute to the video project, but we were thrilled to have them. Post some production pics, guys!

The name of the website 270towin.com is something of a misnomer. Barack Obama is the candidate who, in fact, does need 270 electoral votes to win. Mitt Romney really only needs a tie. You see,  he is virtually guaranteed a win in electoral overtime.

As you know from high school history, if no candidate for president receives a majority of electoral votes in a general election, the contest moves to the House of Representatives. There each state delegation gets a single vote. California would have no more power than Wyoming. Given the current composition of the House, Mitt Romney would have the requisite 26 votes and would become the 45th President of the United States.

Ford and Chase: Comedy Duo

The legislative branch has chosen three presidents. Or four, depending on how you look at it. As it turns out, our Congress has done a pretty mediocre job picking presidents: of the four, only Jefferson would win re-election. The others were pretty forgettable: John Quincy Adams rode his pedigree to the White House; Rutherford B. Hayes never had chance and was referred to as “Rutherfraud” more than Mr. President; and Gerald Ford is better remembered via Chevy Chase’s klutzy portrayal more than anything else. More interesting than their terms in office, each instance of a Congressionally-elected President was under unique circumstances.

In 1800, the electoral college rules were different. Each elector could vote for two people. Normally, the candidate with the most votes would be President and the runner-up would be Vice President. The trouble is that the Framers of the Constitution were excellent at (making) history, but pretty poor at math. That year both Jefferson and Aaron Burr got 73 electoral votes, which normally would have been enough to win. They both got it though, and there was no provision for co-Presidents. Jefferson, of course, won the run-off in Congress. Shortly thereafter, the Twelfth Amendment was passed to fix this flaw.

In 1824, there was no majority winner at all. Andrew Jackson received the most electoral votes, but it was a plurality, split with John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and Henry Clay. Once it went to Congress, however, the well-connected Adams won Clay’s support and defeated Jackson and Crawford. Jackson relished his chance for a rematch four years later and beat Adams handily.

Samuel Tilden – Defeated by Congress, but went on to found the New York Public Library, so he’s a winner to me.

In terms of legal nightmares scenarios, not even the 2000 Florida result could hold a hanging chad to 1876. The country had been through a brutalizing decade and a half. The Civil War, the assassination, the impeachment of his successor, and the scandal-ridden Grant administration had left the nation reeling. Certainly, a disputed election was not needed, but it’s what they got.

Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but stood a single electoral vote short. There were still four states to be counted, but even counting them did not prove quite so simple. Oregon had a disqualified elector, who eventually went for Hayes. Fine, three states to go. Well, it so happened that South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida all had disputed results. Each state had two sets of electors who sent two results to Washington. There was no resolution to be had by simple recount. Ultimately, an electoral committee was convened and the Compromise of 1877 was reached. Hayes became president, Reconstruction ended in the South, and Jim Crow began.

Finally, there is 1974, a real outlier in this list. Gerald Ford, was the only president to be elected by the Senate. In the wake of Spiro Agnew’s resignation after pleading no contest to tax evasion, the Senate overwhelmingly voted to have Ford fill the vacancy. Within a year, Nixon would resign under pressure over Watergate. Ford would lose in 1976 to Jimmy Carter.

With all of those different ways to not clearly elect a president. The nail-biter we might be in for today, should be interesting. For those keeping score tonight who might have a desire for the dramatic, there are a number of different ways that we can reach 269-269. These are just a few.

The adage that no Republican wins without Ohio would have an addendum: no Republican ties without it either.

This is probably the most likely scenario. Obama keeps Ohio and Pennsylvania, but loses all of the South, Iowa, and much of the swing state West. Nevada is the tricky one here, but it’s consistently high unemployment rate could lead to results that buck the polling trends.

Two states can split their allotment of electoral votes: Maine and Nebraska. Once you start doing that, all sorts of things can happen which might lead to a draw. Note that Maine would create a tie with Romney losing Iowa, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire, if only he can pull an upset in Pennsylvania.

I will grant you that these scenarios are not particularly likely. New York Times stats Nerd-in-Chief, gives it a 0.1% chance of happening. However, if it does, this long election season will have the last laugh. You see, while Congress picks the President in the event of a tie, the Democrat-controlled Senate picks the VP. This would mean that if Mitt Romney gets his 269 to win, he’d likely do it with Joe Biden as his VP.

***All maps were generated using 270towin.com, which, contrary to the opening sentence is a lovely site with a lovely name.

Post-tropical Storm Sandy on her visit to Chicago. (Photo credit: Me!)

Not only did Sandy merge with an Arctic cold front to create The Perfecter Storm, she merged with an election. Now that her remnants are spinning themselves out, it’s time to get back to the work of prognostication. In this venture, Sandy will be gone, but not forgotten. Until Election Day, and possibly after, analysts will consider Sandy’s impact on the outcome: Was the government’s reaction too fast or too slow? Was it sufficient in scope? Will climate change be a late entrant into this election’s discourse? Will turnout on Election Day be down in the hardest hit areas? Did the candidates say the right things or were they hurt by a perception that they were trying to parlay a disaster into a political points? So much to speculate on!

The weather, you may have noticed, happens everywhere, and so has made its mark on history. Most famously, the Spanish Armada was crippled by a hurricane off the coast of Ireland in August 1588. They would not defeat the British, nor would they ever again enjoy dominance over the seas. (NOTE: It is my personal belief that this was not technically a hurricane, but like Sandy was probably post- or extra-tropical. Talk to me after class if you want me to expound.)

The weather has shaped science too. Thunderstorms were the rage in the 18th century: Benjamin Franklin flew his famous kite, while Italian physician Luigi Galvani unpacked the electrochemical workings of nerves and muscles by observing the twitches of frogs legs rigged up to wires. As luck would have it, the discovery of the Galvanic response is also acknowledged as an influence on a literary classic, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which itself was a by-product of the weather. Shelley hatched the idea for The Modern Prometheus while she and her pals (including Percy Shelley and Lord Byron) were fighting cabin fever during the damp, cold, volcanically-induced weather of The Year Without a Summer.

For all that and volumes more, the intersection of the weather and American politics is a little bit slipperier. The aforementioned Year Without A Summer certainly did a small part shaping American history. It drove western migration from New England to as far west as Ohio and Indiana because of crop failures. Some towns in Vermont and Maine virtually vanished. Among those to move was the family of Joseph Smith, who resettled in western New York where Moroni would appear to him and Mormonism was born. (I think I just tied the weather from 200 years ago to this election. Score!)

The mayor-breaking blizzard of 1979.

Direct impacts of weather on American politics are surprisingly hard to find. One clear example comes from here in Chicago. In 1979, sitting Mayor Michael Bilandic was blamed for mismanaging the city’s response to two blizzards shortly before the mayoral primary. Thirty-five inches of snow fell over about two weeks and Chicago was simply not ready: streets went unplowed, garbage wasn’t picked up, mass transit was crippled, and six weeks later voters made Bilandic a lame duck mayor. The beneficiary of his bunglings, Jane Byrne, has asserted that she would have won without the snow, but historians and local lore alike are not so sure.

Nationally, if there is one leader we can attribute to the weather, it’s Herbert Hoover. Looking at his resume, Hoover seemed much more suited to policy architect/wonk than president. His career was as a mining engineer who rose to Secretary of Commerce under Harding and then Coolidge. Having made a name for himself helping to rebuild Europe after World War I, Hoover tried a brief run at the presidency in 1920, but essentially bowed out after losing the primary in California, his home state. It wasn’t until 1927 that he’d have his chance.

The rains started in the fall of 1926, causing significant flooding, but more importantly saturating the ground, priming it for the real water to come. Those would arrive in the spring of 1927 when the rains came and didn’t stop. They corresponded with and exacerbated the annual spring melt. They led to the breaching of almost 150 levees and inundated an estimated 27,000 square miles. They caused the greatest flood in American history.

Hoover spearheaded the relief effort. There was no FEMA then and he famously leveraged private resources to help with the relief effort noting, “I suppose I could have called in the whole of the army, but what was the use? All I had to do was to call in Main Street itself.” He coordinated ships to bring supplies and built tent cities to house the flood’s refugees. Perhaps most importantly Hoover utilized some new technology, the radio, to take to the airwaves with his pitch for relief efforts. This elevated his profile among the electorate and set the stage for his successful bid for the presidency in 1928.

That would be the only election Hoover would ever win. Those tent cities were eerie predecessors to the notorious Hoovervilles of the Depression. And there massive inequity in the relief effort for African-Americans who were affected. Hoover initially kept those quiet, but by 1932 those failures drove support to Franklin Roosevelt, helping to end African-American allegiance to Republicans that dated back to Lincoln. Mother Nature may have given him his chance at the White House, but she also laid the foundation to take it away.

The Plays for Presidents team recently held one of our regular meetings in the lush confines of our Google+ Hangout. As we are in the homestretch of the 2012 festival, much of the talk was about dotting I’s and crossing T’s: promoting all the openings, continuing to communicate with participants across the country, etc. But then we asked the question that arises in every production: what do we do next? Once all the houselights are up, sets are struck, and, most importantly, the votes counted, what are we going to do with ourselves? Educational outreach and a bigger, better 2016 festival are fine ideas, but I am here to throw down the gauntlet. I want Plays for Presidents to come clean on a horrifying oversight: the 16 missing American presidencies.

Students of American history – and really anyone who can distinguish between different four-digit numbers – may have noticed something fishy about our country’s past: we declared independence in 1776, but our “first” president doesn’t get sworn in until 1789. I know that we are falling behind in math and science, but did we really think that no one would notice? Something is clearly up.

What’s up is that George Washington was elected president under a governmental structure that didn’t take shape until the Constitution was written and ratified. Prior to that the “President” was actually the President of the Continental Congress; and, in fact, we had our first one of those guys 2 years before the Declaration was even signed. (Incidentally, John Hancock’s legendary, space-hogging signature might be somewhat forgiven since he held the title of President and the time. It wasn’t just an ego thing.)

I know full well that the roles and responsibilities of the 16 apocryphal presidents were not commensurate with George Washington et. al. The President of the Continental Congress was closer to emcee than Commander-In-Chief. He presided over the Congress’s proceedings, signed documents, kept meetings moving along, and probably delivered innocuous, corny jibes at delegates to keep things light. Ceremonial as these presidents were, they represented one of the critical anxieties that helped shape the future architecture of this country. The Founding Fathers had a seeming paradox on their hands: the newborn democracy would need strong leadership to survive, but democracy by definition needed to keep overly strong leadership in check.

We know, of course, how this all was resolved: representative democracy, federalism, and a separation of powers. Within this, the idea and place of the President of the United States was (re-)invented and the pre-Constitutional emcees largely forgotten. It is for them that I make my plea for the 2016 staging of 60 (or 61) Plays for 60 (or 61) Presidents. Here are a few starter tidbits, my lovely and talented playwright-y colleagues:

• You think that Cleveland invented the whole “elected to non-consecutive terms” thing? Nay, says Virginian Peyton Randolph, Grover the Poseur ain’t got nothing. Randolph was the first and third presidents. Plus, Thomas Jefferson called him “a most excellent man,” though “somewhat cold and coy towards strangers. (Incidentally, Hancock was the 4th and 13th. Talk about non-consecutive! Whoa boy!)
• While several Presidents owned slaves, Henry Laurens (President 5) trafficked in them. He was one of South Carolina’s wealthiest men and thousands of slaves came through his Charleston auction house, many shipped from the Bunce Island slave castle in Sierra Leone. Fate was not overly kind to him. He was a prisoner of war, doing more than a year in the Tower of London, after which he was never quite hale and hearty.
• What about Nathaniel Gorham? The Massachusetts native was a master debater, advocating fiercely for a strong Congress and for his state’s ratification of the Constitution. Still he admitted that, because of its size, the United States would surely eventually fracture into several independent countries. Oh, and he has a street named after him in Madison, WI, just a block or so from the Forward Theater’s production. While you cruise his strip, we’ll get cracking on the missing plays.

Tomorrow it begins. If the conventions are the real Opening Day for election season, then we should find ourselves quickly in the pennant race with the debates. To hear the candidates tell it, however, this is nothing of the sort. The pre-spin on both sides is all about how winning isn’t that important, or even relevant. It’s almost as if there is nothing to actually win and that the Debate in Denver is just an exhibition game with no conceivable impact on the outcome of the Championship to be held on Election Day.

This seems to be in stark contrast with what much of the electorate imagines can happen in a debate. I, for one, think every debate can be Lincoln and Douglas: intellectual titans delivering oratory, vision, and zingers in equal measure. They should be a forum for ideas and reason and the spirited flexing of rhetorical muscles. The trouble is that I am totally wrong. After all (a) the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates weren’t even for a presidential election (they were for the 1858 Senate race in Illinois) and (b) history shows that fatal blows are rarely attempted, let alone landed, in a modern American presidential debate.

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